Meditations
by AstraPerAspera
Summary: She wished she had been able to tell her the whole story...." Helen's sleepless night in Rome, immediately after The Five.


**Meditations**

by

AstraPerAspera

_A/N: Thanks again to jenniferjf, my de facto muse in all things Sanctuary_

The city had hardly changed. The first time her father had brought her here they'd stayed in a small villa just off the Via Appia. It had been deliciously foreign. So unlike the damp, dirty streets of London. The city was awash with warmth and color and sunlight; brimming not with mere subsistence, but with life. And people who enjoyed that life. Street vendors had called to her, their stands bursting with flowers she'd only seen in her father's books. Musicians congregated on corners, serenading passers-by. Merchants' shops overflowed onto the streets with wares like jewels spilled from an up-ended jar. Voices speaking the language of Puccini and Verdi were like music to her ears. It had almost been enough to make her forget the gaping wound in her heart and the emptiness in her womb.

Almost.

But not quite.

And for all of her father's efforts--for all of his planned amusements and sight-seeing and yes, even the business of meeting with others who shared his passion for the beautifully unique and bizarre, she could never quite disassociate her memories of the place with the time in her life when she'd lost everything. Which was why, perhaps, she'd never made the effort to show it to Ashley as her father had shown it to her. She had wanted simply to forget.

She closed her eyes and let the warm breeze blow across her face. A sweet scent—jasmine, perhaps—swept up from the gardens below, all the more fragrant in the night air. It was late—not that it mattered. Even on a good night sleep was a rare commodity. Tonight it wasn't even a consideration.

The sounds of the city drifted through the air. A distant siren. A plane overhead. The indefinable hum of movement and people who, like her, had neither will nor desire to sleep. That part had changed. Her midnight walks on the villa's balcony as her father slept had overlooked a city at rest. There had been no twinkling lights, no constant motion, no roar of distant traffic. There had been peace. And rest. Both of which had alluded her at the time. And which might account for the affinity she felt for the place now more so than before.

Behind her she could hear the thin gauze curtains flapping gently in the open doorway. The breeze was comfortable to her, but possibly cool to Ashley, asleep inside. Leaving the city to itself, she pulled the doors partially closed behind her and stood for a moment looking down at her child.

Perhaps it was a trick of the light. Or the dark. But for all her twenty-three years, Helen could only see the small girl her daughter had once been lying there atop the still made-up bed. She'd watched her like this then too. Quietly stealing into her room at night just to look at her. Scarcely, at times, believing she was real. Needing to see her. To watch her even breaths, the steady rise and fall of her chest. To gaze upon her small and vulnerable face and try to not imagine that she saw features there that evoked conflicting memories of great love and greater pain.

She had tried not to love her too much. The girl was to be a companion. A pupil. A protégé. She had schooled herself over two lifetimes to keep her distance, knowing full well that people passed in and out of her life like the wind. So she had been completely unprepared for the depth of feeling the child had stirred in her—emotions she'd thought herself no longer capable of ever experiencing again. With one bright smile the girl had torn down the fortress it had taken her a century to carefully construct. She hadn't felt so alive in a hundred years; nor more vulnerable.

She knew better. Really. Emotion…connection…they were commodities she could ill-afford. They had bested her judgment once and too many had paid the price for her failure. Including the young woman asleep on the bed who should have grown up in petticoats and ribbons, spoiled on her father's knee, not tied by him to a chair and confronted with a brutal truth which she herself had been too reticent to reveal.

Or perhaps…not even have grown up at all. Or existed as anything other than a bitter footnote to the darkest of her days. Because Ashley's mere existence had been her fault too: a moment of weakness when she had wanted…had _needed_…someone to ease the desperate ache of decades alone.

Alone without him.

In the chaos of the moment, she'd hardly even had time to really see him before he'd vanished. Yet she found she could recall every detail of his appearance as he'd stepped back from them, half-bowing in a gesture of courtesy she hadn't seen for decades. She could still feel the warm pressure of his hand on her arm before she'd wrenched it away; hear the apologetic tone in his voice. And his eyes showed a trace of the softness she remembered from so long ago. Before.

But cured? Cured? Skepticism persisted. He was cunning and twisted and capable of manipulating even his daughter for his own preservation. She had no way of knowing to what end he might be plotting. And the fact that he'd told Ashley the truth of their past meant little. Even if he had come to her rescue; even if he had asked for nothing in return. Even if Ashley now slept, safe and sound, in front of her. She could not trust him. She must not.

_I'm simply glad to see you safe and sound._.

Odd words, coming from him. Especially as how, at this moment, she'd never felt less safe or sound in her life. And it had nothing whatsoever to do with the Cabal or Tesla or his league of mindless minions.

A breeze found its way through the partially open door, a bit more chilled now with the night's damp air. She picked up a spare blanket and laid it gently across the sleeping girl. Ashley stirred slightly but did not wake. They had walked, it seemed, from one end of the city to the other, three thousand years of civilization manifesting itself at every junction. Architecture. Art. History. Music. Every sight and sound a topic of conversation. It had made it easy to not talk about anything else.

Too easy.

In a way, she wished she'd been able to tell her the entire story. The words had formed in her head a half dozen different ways all day. But there had been a set to Ashley's jaw that had made the topic unapproachable once they'd left the tower; and she knew that the moment for speaking of it…for explanations…had passed. She had half-expected an angry outburst, a justifiable outrage expressed as colorfully as only Ashley could. Instead, her controlled demeanor had been chillingly reminiscent of John's own façade of calm and restraint; and witnessing the tacit connection the two of them seemed to have made in their brief time together only drove that comparison all that much further home.

And it frightened her.

More than the Cabal. More than Tesla and his mindless minions. More than any abnormal she'd ever encountered. More, even, than John himself.

She had watched the person she had once loved more than life itself succumb to his inner demons because of her own failings. Ashley was already so like him in more ways than she cared to consider that the possibility that their daughter might manifest the same vulnerability was more terrifying than words could begin to express.

Try as she had, she could not deny it any more. Ashley was indeed her father's daughter.

And as it had been with her father, she felt her slipping through her fingers like so much sand.

A stray strand of blond hair slid across Ashley's face as she turned in her sleep. Instinctively she reached out to pull it back, but withdrew her hand at the last moment, not wanting to disturb her. They had an early flight, after all.

Returning to the balcony doors she stared out at the Eternal City. She would not lose Ashley as she'd lost John. If there was any one task to which she was committed, it was that. When they returned home, she would find a way to make this right—to make it up to her and perhaps, finally, explain. Maybe all Ashley needed was time and space to sort through it all, and the less interference from her, the better.

She had interfered before, with disastrous results. She must not make the same mistake twice. Because if she did…if she lost Ashley…it would be like losing John all over again. And there would be no balm for that wound. No distraction great enough, no mission important enough to ever ease that pain. There hadn't been the first time. Not really. Not for nearly a hundred of those one hundred and twenty-three years.

Glancing over her shoulder, she thought she could see again the little girl Ashley had been, but she knew it was only an illusion of the dark. Time never went backward for her. Only unrelentingly, ceaselessly forward. She couldn't undo what had been done. She couldn't protect Ashley from the truth any longer. But she refused to surrender her willingly to forces beyond her this time.

This time she would get it right.


End file.
